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Individually, I am already unreasonable about these characters. Veronica Sawyer is the best part of Heathers, she's the icon, she's the moment, I love her, she's the best. What I love most about Veronica is her contradictions. She's so smart, and she constantly makes incredibly dumbass decisions. She's so good, capable of such empathy and compassion and courage, and also she fucking sucks. The opening song is her saying, "These kids used to be such kind people, and I genuinely think they could be again, now listen to my incredibly mean and bitchy opinions about them."

It's very real, to me. Everyone contains some contradictions. And the thing is that both those sides of her are authentic. Her compassion is so powerful that it eventually saves Heather McNamara's life even though she has tons of very good reasons to hate Mac. But at the same time, she's capable of judging and dehumanizing her classmates enough that she's calling them monsters to justify being part of their murders. She judges the Heathers and thinks she's better than them, but at the same time she covets their life and falls so easily into being a part of it. If the transition had been a little slower, if Heather had picked a target Veronica cared about less, she could easily have become just like them. She's someone who wants so much —love, protection, status— but is constantly in tension with her unwillingness to accept the cost of getting what she wants. It makes her a great protagonist.

Heather Chandler is an obsession of mine and I'm not sorry about that. I love her, she's the worst. She's honestly a perfectly designed character to put me, specifically, in a chokehold. The only way she could be more precision designed for me is if she were thirty-something and extremely divorced. (Incidentally, yes, I do have fic outlines where she's thirty-something and extremely divorced.) I love a mean queen bee, and I love a crass woman, and I love a powerful woman who tries to bring the women she's obsessed with under the umbrella of her power.

The thing that makes me most feral about Heather is that she's someone who is a product of her environment, who has made herself master of her environment to survive and thrive in it, and who, because of that, can never be happy. Like, as shitty as Heather is, she is what the queen of Westerburg has to be. Westerburg sucks. Every adult in Heathers is at best useless, and more often actively harmful. There is no protection, no support, no safety.

Except Heather Chandler.

Like, our introduction to the Heathers is that we're told they're solid Teflon, never harassed, and then we are basically immediately shown a guy fantasizing about sexually assaulting a Heather. The spectre of sexual violence is there from the very start. But it is true that they're not bothered or harassed, and that is because Heather is master of this shit-ass environment. As soon as Chandler dies, the other Heathers are immediately threatened by Ram and Kurt, because Chandler was the only one who could control them.

But she does this by leveraging their misogyny and her own objectification, just like she maintains her status by being a cruel bully, even to her own friends, and acts happy and vapid while reading complex, dark literature privately, and pretends to be aloof and annoyed with Veronica while kind of being obsessed with her. And, y'know, in my opinion, hides that she's a massive lesbian. Because that's what she has to do to be queen, to be in control, to be safe with absolutely no support structure. Even if it sucks for everyone else and honestly, sucks for her, too.

So, individually, I am unreasonable about both of these characters. But then on top of that, they have my absolute favourite ship dynamic: two people whose flaws are what makes them perfect for each other.

Veronica is attracted to someone a little broken, she likes a fixer-upper. She's willing to overlook red flags and stay with someone well past the point where she should. This works out not great for her in canon, but it also means she's exactly the type of person capable of getting past Heather's defenses, of enduring her attempts to avoid vulnerability, until Heather feels safe and stable enough to actually form a meaningful relationship. There is a human in Heather, and if Veronica is willing to let herself, she's capable of having empathy and compassion and even love for that human in spite of everything shitty Heather has done.

But Veronica also craves safety and protection and, yeah, status and comfort, and those are the things Heather creates. Heather is ruthlessly pragmatic, but she is that way in pursuit of creating the very things Veronica so badly wants. And Veronica lacks the stomach and, often, the knowledge and ability to go create those things, but Heather doesn't. A version of Heather that was capable of reining in her worse impulses and excesses is the perfect person to create the supportive environment to allow Veronica to be as good as she wants to be. There is, somewhere between the two of them, a possible synthesis where Veronica's kindness blunts Heather's edges and Heather's pragmatism creates a safe foundation for Veronica's idealism.